


wreck my plans (that's my man)

by liadan14



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Artist!Joe, Bookstore AU, Carpenter!Nicky, Enemies to Lovers, First Meetings, Flirting via violent disagreement about the western canon, Grinding, Hipster!Nicky, Literary References, M/M, Minor Backround Book of Nile, Modern AU, Oral Sex, Professor!Joe, Rough Oral Sex, Sort Of, a series of hot takes about classic and contemporary literature disguised as a fic, on a very small scale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:40:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Come down slowly, Joe thinks hysterically as he descends the ladder right into the arms of this man who, very unfortunately, smells incredibly good, just a hint of sandalwood on his skin, and feels incredibly firm and comforting against Joe as he makes sure the ladder doesn’t break while Joe’s still on it. Come down slowly, he thinks, and imagines, against his better judgment, coming down slowly next to this man in bed.If only his opinions on literature weren’t sowrong.(In which Joe is accidentally seduced into happiness by Schrödinger's hipster.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 134
Kudos: 793





	wreck my plans (that's my man)

There’s a man in the Russian literature aisle who might be the actual devil.

He’s tall, about as tall as Joe anyway, and his hair just brushes his shoulders, half of it tied up in a messy bun on the top of his head. He’s wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses and the most non-descript shirt Joe has seen on another human being since he was sixteen and went to his parents’ holiday party at the Moroccan consulate.

In fact, he looks almost exactly like all the assholes who sit in the discussion sections for Intro to Lit, the guys who come to class still kind of stoned only to spitball ideas like, _I think dogs are really important in modern literature. Because, like, there was a dog in Mrs. Dalloway, right?_ The only difference is that this guy isn’t wearing plaid.

The worst of it is, he’s reverently stroking the spine of _White Nights._

“Excuse me,” Joe says, and tries to squeeze around him, but he’s standing right in the middle of the aisle, and neither of them are small men, and short story is that he ends up hip-checking the asshole’s ass by accident, which leads to a) the realization that those jeans aren’t doing him any favors because there’s a lot more going on there than meets the eye, and b) the asshole glaring at him and saying, “Do you _mind_?”

Joe’s not exactly on his best behavior – it’s been a long semester, so sue him, no one told him so many self-entitled hipsters attended Lewis and Clark and he’s starting to think a career in academia is going to be a pain in the nuts.

Still, he should probably not have rolled his eyes and scoffed quite so aggressively.

The asshole tells him to fuck off, which Joe maybe kind of deserves, and then Joe tells him he has shit taste in literature, which he definitely deserves. The asshole then calls him a philistine, which is honestly worse than being told to fuck off, and the next thing Joe knows, he’s standing in the middle of his favorite bookstore in the world, saying, “Says the man holding the diary of a 19th century incel,” in a very accusatory tone.

“I don’t even know what that means,” the stranger yells back.

Joe sighs, deeply put-upon. He wishes he didn’t know, either, but now that he does, the rest of the world can burn with him. “You know, those assholes online who think women owe them sex and then become school shooters when they don’t get it?” It’s a recurring nightmare he has, actually, that one day he, too, will be trapped in the nightmare scenario enabled by America’s terrible lack of gun control. Not for the first time, he wonders why he didn’t look for a job in Europe (the answer is that there are no jobs in Europe for academics, but Joe can dream).

The asshole frowns. “I have never heard of that happening,” he says.

“Like Elliot Rodger,” Joe says. “Men who, for whatever reason, haven’t had sex, think every time they’re nice to a woman, she owes them gratitude in sexual favors, and claim the whole world is against them because that’s not how things work.”

The asshole blinks slowly. “I don’t see what that has to do with _White Nights_ ,” he says. He has a nice accent, very melodic. “It’s a beautiful story about loneliness, nothing…sordid.”

Joe throws his hands up. “The narrator basically stalks Nastenka!” He says. “And he acts like it’s entirely up to her to make him happy! He puts no effort into improving his own life, and when she goes back to her own life, he decides to be miserable forever! What an asshole.”

The asshole right in front of Joe has the gall to raise his eyebrows and smirk, saying, “Sounds like you’re reading too much into it.”

At this point in time, Joe cannot remember ever being more angry at another human being.

He stalks off, turns the corner into British classics, grabs a James at random and returns to throw it at the asshole. “Read a good book for once,” he fumes, and stalks off to get a look at the Flaubert translation he was here to check in the first place, because one of his students claimed they had read a translation with better phrasing than the one Joe had picked and if she’s right, Joe wants to know.

* * *

He spends the next week and a half stewing over the interaction. Three days later, in the shower, he realizes he should have told the asshole that reading too much into things is his goddamn job. A week later, he starts regretting that it was _The Ambassadors_ he threw at the asshole and not _The Turn of the Screw_. 

Ten days after, Booker knocks on his door and asks for help restocking the European literature section.

It’s Joe’s hell day, three back to back seminars ending in the Intro class, but he says yes anyway. Booker’s store is an institution in Portland, and Booker’s business is suffering due to the West Coast being on fire. He has a lot of older staff members, people who work at Powell’s to make a few extra cents on their retirement, who have to stick it out at home because their lungs or their hearts can’t handle breathing literal poison, and Joe knows Booker is a secret bleeding heart who would never take them off payroll for the weeks they can’t come in. Besides, Joe gets reduced prices for helping out every now and again, and Booker’s friend (who might be a sex friend, Joe hasn’t worked it out yet) Nile gives Joe a plate of her perfect deep-dish pizza whenever she makes it at his place, right across the hall from Joe’s.

This is how he winds up sorting through the British classics to make space for the new staff recommendations at seven PM on a Thursday, when the asshole turns the corner towards him.

“You,” the asshole says. “Do you _work here_?”

Joe looks down from his ladder. “No,” Joe snaps, although he does privately understand why one would think that.

“Good,” the asshole says. “Your book was awful.”

“Henry James is a master of his craft,” Joe replies, seething, but unwilling to get really worked up while he’s standing on a ladder.

The asshole huffs. “That’s all there is to it, though, craft. Everything at a distance, there was no real feeling in the whole book but disappointment.”

“I—” Joe starts, then says, “You—” and then the rung he’s standing on cracks ominously and he grabs at the shelf desperately.

He should have made Booker help him.

“It’s alright,” that infuriatingly melodic voice says below him. “I’ve got the ladder, just come down slowly.”

Come down slowly, Joe thinks hysterically as he descends the ladder right into the arms of this man who, very unfortunately, smells incredibly good, just a hint of sandalwood on his skin, and feels incredibly firm and comforting against Joe as he makes sure the ladder doesn’t break while Joe’s still on it. Come down slowly, he thinks, and imagines, against his better judgment, coming down slowly next to this man in bed.

If only his opinions on literature weren’t so _wrong_.

“Thank you,” he says, trying not to sound too begrudging.

“Of course,” the asshole says. “Your book was still bad.”

“It was revolutionary writing!” Joe protests. “The way James writes about infidelity – understanding human error –“

“Makes it seem like no one is actually hurt by it,” the stranger concludes. “There’s no…no…”

“Pathos?” Joe suggests. “That’s the genius. He was doing what Brecht did with theater, only decades earlier and better.”

The stranger shakes his head, disapproving.

“You’re, what, Italian?” Joe asks, guesstimating the accent.

The stranger nods slowly.

Joe shrugs. “Maybe you just can’t live without pathos, then.”

It’s a dick move, and he knows it, but he’s not expecting the stranger to turn practically purple, stalk down the shelf towards the Ms and come back with a brass-backed signet classics edition of _Of Human Bondage_.

“Maybe you’re just no good at picking books,” the stranger says. “Also, fuck you.”

This time, Joe agrees that he kind of deserves it.

* * *

_Of Human Bondage_ is the most infuriating book Joe has ever read.

It takes him two days to finish.

It takes him two weeks to pinpoint why he hates it.

By then, the air quality is alright again, so Joe has no real excuse to go to the bookstore other than that he really wants to run into a stranger he hates in order to tell him that he’s double wrong about everything forever. Joe lasts a day telling himself that’s a dumb thing to do before remembering that his sister’s going to have a baby in a week and there’s no way he can afford to be there and meet his new niece for at least a year, and instead, he has to grade the Intro to Lit midterm next week, which will be full of bullshit.

Loitering around Booker’s shop for an hour, window-shopping, seems like a fine way to spend his time instead of thinking about that.

The asshole doesn’t show up.

Reasonably, Joe is aware he can’t expect the other man to be at the bookstore at the exact same time and place as Joe, loitering around British classics like a very strange stalker. The guy probably has a job to keep him in shirts that are so bland they’re neither grey nor beige. It’s still disappointing; disappointing enough that Joe comes back two days later, on Saturday, with a thermos of coffee, and spends a few hours meandering.

It’s a huge store, plenty of time to meander.

They run into each other just as Joe is leaving the poetry section, which is some explanation for what happens next; he tries to stay away from modern poetry because it’s just too painful for the most part, to remember that his overstuffed notebooks of the stuff, words he’d written and re-written for a full decade, weren’t worthy of being published when the poems of some twenty-year-old who starred on _Riverdale_ were.

“ _You_ ,” Joe says, full of venom, when he spots the stranger.

“Me,” the stranger says peaceably, as if he’d fully expected Joe.

“You have wasted _hours_ of my life,” Joe informs him, “thinking about the worst book I have ever read.” He pauses a moment, then decides fuck it and ploughs right on, unwilling to allow any defense for Maugham. “It could have been written by any cynical eighteen-year-old who thinks it’s deep to say that altruism isn’t real because it makes people feel good to be nice to others.”

“You don’t think that’s true?” The stranger asks.

“No,” Joe says, shocked. “I think it’s the best thing about humanity, that doing good makes us feel good.”

“Oh,” the stranger says, shocked. “Well. That’s actually…lovely. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

Some of Joe’s rage abates. Some, not all. “And the love story,” he says. “If you could even call it that.”

The stranger’s eyebrows raise.

“Well, it’s not about love, is it,” Joe says, defensively.

“Of course it is,” the stranger says. “It’s about how love makes us forget ourselves, how the deepest love can corrupt.”

“That’s not love,” Joe protests, interrupting, desperate. How can a man this handsome and well-read not _know_ this? “That’s obsession. He doesn’t _love_ Mildred.”

“Of course he does,” the stranger says, baffled. “He says so, so many times.”

Joe rolls his eyes. God save him from people who don’t read between the lines. “Just because he thinks so doesn’t mean it’s true. For fuck’s sake, he doesn’t _like_ anything about her, he just wants to sleep with her.”

The stranger’s lips purse. “What about Sally?”

“Sally,” Joe says. “You mean the woman he settles for because he decides he needs someone to take care of him? I mean, talk about a mother-whore dichotomy—”

“Santa Maria, must you analyze everything to the bone until there’s no joy left in it?” The stranger snaps, flushing red.

“Yes!” Joe says. “It’s literally my job!”

(Today, he checked RateMyProfessor for the first time since starting at Lewis and Clark, and he has a 4,5 rating and one of those stupid chili peppers, and it made him feel _guilty_ of all things because he hates this job).

(Maybe that’s why, when the stranger opens his mouth to respond, Joe steps right into his personal space.)

(Maybe that’s why he says, “What went wrong in your life that you think something so sad and misguided is _love_?”)

(Maybe it’s because the flush of anger is still settled in the stranger’s cheeks, and he looks _edible_.)

(Maybe it’s because the stranger says, “You _asshole_ —” and instead of being insulted, Joe is just drawn to the softness of his lips around the word.)

Somehow, the fight ends with Joe furiously kissing a man he could have sworn was the bane of his existence ten minutes ago up against the modern poetry shelf.

The man’s lips are soft and plush against his, just as Joe had imagined, and he’s gone soft and loose against Joe all of a sudden. Joe has to fight the urge to hold him close as if he were a lover and not a stranger. He compensates by using his body to press the stranger further away from the well-lit part of the shop.

The whole affair ends with Joe on his knees at the back of the poetry section, as far away from prying eyes as he could push the stranger.

The stranger is gratifyingly breathless after only moments, his hands white-knuckled where he’s gripping the shelves for balance as Joe does his level best to suck his soul out. If he even has one. This close, Joe drinks the scent of his skin in greedily, warm and clean and just that hint of product. Last time, Joe had thought it was sandalwood, but this time he could swear it’s pine on the stranger’s hands.

Joe’s tactile by nature, so he really can’t help how his hands run up and down the man’s body, pulling him closer and closer, palming the curve of his ass. He’s so wrapped up in the smell, the taste, the feel of this man that he nearly misses how the knees he’s pressing against the shelves buckle. He doesn’t miss the strangled sound that escapes the man’s throat, or the way his hand clenches on Joe’s shoulder, and he certainly doesn’t miss the hot spill of salt across his tongue.

When he’s sure the other man is done, he rocks back onto his heels and slides up his body, until they’re face to face again.

“What’s your name?” The other man asks.

“Joe,” Joe says.

“I’m Nicky,” Nicky tells him.

“Nice to meet you?“ Joe tries.

The laugh Nicky huffs against his lips is such a gentle sound Joe feels it reverberate against something inside him.

“So,” Nicky says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Was this to convince me about love?”

Joe lets his forehead rest against Nicky’s collarbone to hide how badly he’s blushing, and also to get his own arousal at least a little under control. “I think it was to convince you about altruism?” He says.

Nicky’s right eyebrow lifts. “So you got nothing from that?” He shifts his leg just so, so that Joe can’t help but grind down against him.

“Of course I did,” Joe grins. “That’s what made it so good.”

“Well,” Nicky says. “Maybe you’ll convince me about love next time.”

“Mm,” Joe agrees. “I have just the thing.”

Nicky trails after him, back to British literature. “At least it’s by a woman this time,” Joe says, “maybe this will improve things.”

Nicky accepts the copy of _North and South_ Joe presses against his chest. “Next week?” He suggests.

Joe agrees.

* * *

Joe has had weirder things to look forward to than seeing the man he sucked off in a very public place to discuss romantic literature of the Industrialization.

At the same time, he has definitely not had a stranger date to look forward to…ever.

It’s a date, he thinks.

Probably.

He rereads his favorite bits of the book, just to be sure he was right about it – he was – and spends half an hour picking the right shirt before he heads to the bookstore the next Saturday.

Nicky is waiting for him by the classics, and Joe’s thrilled to see he’s wearing a blue button-up shirt. It’s an actual color, and that color is making Nicky’s eyes pop. Definitely a date.

“So?” Joe asks, bouncing on his heels. “What did you think?”

Nicky smirks, the corners of his mouth just barely turning up. Joe remembers how he had laughed, just a little, just for Joe, last time. He wants that again.

“I don’t know,” Nicky says airily. “It seemed like he had to change everything about himself for her.”

“He _wanted_ to change,” Joe protests. “Before he ever met her, he wanted to, that’s why he was getting tutored by her father!”

“Eh,” Nicky says. “Is it really romantic to hate someone the first time you meet?”

Joe snorts. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

“The jury’s still out,” Nicky tells him. “And that whole subplot with her brother was a little contrived, no?”

“The mutiny on the Bounty was a historical event!” Joe protests hotly. “It’s not contrived, it’s a thing! A real thing! That happened!”

He’s rewarded by Nicky’s soft, melodic laugh. “This really is your job,” he observes.

“Yes,” he says. “I teach literature at Lewis and Clark.”

“Very sexy,” Nicky says. “Do you wear a blazer with shoulder pads? Glasses?”

“Says the literal, actual hipster,” Joe tells him.

Nicky’s brow furrows. “What am I?” he asks, like he’s never heard the word before.

Joe is stupidly charmed.

“Your style,” he says, and reaches over to tug a strand of Nicky’s hair where it escapes his customary half-bun. “It’s very…uh…modern.”

“That is not something I have ever been accused of before,” Nicky says.

Joe throws his head back and laughs.

They spend three hours in the bookstore.

Nicky thinks the backdrop of industrialization and unionization is exploitative and merely a vehicle for the book’s rich protagonists to better themselves, which Joe can sort of get behind, except that Nicky doesn’t seem to appreciate Thornton’s own background in poverty as a driving force of the plot.

It turns out, when they take the time to discuss the book properly, it’s a lot of fun.

By the end, they’ve even revisited _The Ambassadors_ , and Joe has admitted it’s not his favorite James either, but he couldn’t find _The Turn of the Screw_ because he was so angry. Joe’s pretty sure it’s a tacit agreement of civility that keeps them both from mentioning _Of Human Bondage_ again.

At about four PM, Nicky checks his watch and pulls off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “I need to go,” he says.

“Oh,” Joe says. “Well, that’s alright.”

With his glasses off, Nicky’s eyes are lethal. “Will I see you again?” He asks.

Joe gives him his smuggest smile. “I don’t know,” he says. “Have you got anything for me to read until then?”

They’ve been sitting on the floor in the back of the British classics section as they talked, studiously ignoring the shoppers passing them by. Joe’s knees creak when Nicky pulls him up, but he ignores it because Nicky doesn’t let go of his hand as he leads Joe towards contemporary fiction.

Joe leaves the store with a copy of Elena Ferrante’s _My Brilliant Friend_ and with the phantom press of Nicky’s lips to his cheek, a shy kiss just before they said goodbye.

He spends the next week being relentlessly teased by Booker for spending three full hours sitting on the floor of his bookstore, talking to a guy with a man bun, and by Nile for not even getting his phone number.

Until Tuesday, Joe is walking on air.

Then he reads the book.

The next Saturday, Joe blurts out, “Why do you like this book?” before they can even say hello.

“Because it speaks to me,” Nicky says easily. “Who hasn’t had a friendship like that?”

“What, intensely homoerotic and unhealthily codependent?” Joe asks. “Me. I haven’t.”

Nicky flushes, stepping away from where he had, Joe realizes, come close to say hello. “Maybe you just can’t understand it because you’re not Italian,” he says snidely, revenge for Joe’s dumb comment two weeks ago.

Joe winces.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I deserved that.”

“You did,” Nicky agrees.

“I just…found this book really upsetting,” Joe says.

“That’s why it’s _good_ ,” Nicky has the gall to say.

Joe throws his hands up in frustration. “Art doesn’t become good because it causes pain.”

“I enjoy books that make me feel. Are you going to judge me for that, too?” Nicky’s eyes are blazing and his fists are balled and Joe has absolutely no good excuse for the fact that he decides to keep goading him.

“You must be a glutton for punishment, then,” he says.

“I must,” Nicky agrees, a low growl, and then he’s pushing Joe up against the opposite shelf and kissing him roughly, almost violently.

The shelves dig into Joe’s back uncomfortably.

The murmur of shoppers around them reminds Joe they’re not alone.

The hot press of Nicky’s body is undeniable.

“Not here,” Joe gets out when Nicky switches to biting at Joe’s neck.

“Huh?” Nicky asks into his skin.

“Booker’s a friend. ‘S his shop.”

“Didn’t bother you last time,” Nicky accuses. His teeth scrape the tendon running down Joe’s neck to his shoulder and Joe whimpers.

“Bothered me after,” he says, and Nicky pulls away.

“I live across the street,” Nicky says.

Normally, Joe refuses to jaywalk in America. Nobody can drive for shit and there’s too much traffic.

Today, he allows Nicky to pull him across the street, barely even looking to see if there are cars coming.

Nicky lives above a furniture shop. He leads Joe past rows of lovingly hand-crafted chairs and tables, the kind of stuff Joe always told himself he would by when he grew up, when he was successful. Here he is, thirty years old, on a temporary, non-tenure-track contract, with no furniture to his name that doesn’t come from IKEA.

Joe’s still kind of thinking about it when Nicky pulls him through the door to his apartment and then presses him up against it.

Then, Nicky hisses, “Satisfied?” in his ear.

Most of Joe’s upstairs brain turns off. “Not yet,” he says, and then Nicky slides down to his knees.

Distantly, Joe wonders if it was this hot when he did this to Nicky.

He doubts it.

Nicky’s gaze manages to be scornful and heated at the same time as he looks up from where he’s kneeling in front of Joe, his hands firm on Joe’s hips. His lips are rough, chapped, when he gets them around Joe’s cock, and Joe’s fist pounds into the door.

“You can pull my hair,” Nicky says, pulling back. Joe could cry.

He gets his hand into Nicky’s hair and loses most of his understanding of space and time.

It’s soft in his fingers and he can’t quite help using that fucking half-bun as a grip, to pull and push at Nicky’s head as his tongue traces wild patterns against the underside of Joe’s cock.

“Nicky,” he gasps, and then his mouth is open and he can’t really do anything against all the words spilling out of it. “Nicky, you’re so beautiful, your eyes are like the sea, _Nicky,_ you look like you were made for this, you ought to be worshipped, _Nicky_ , please, please—”

Nicky takes one hand off of Joe’s hip and Joe instantly misses the clench of his fingers, the slight dig of pain, but then he uses the hand to press Joe’s more firmly to his skull, to force Joe to fuck all the way into his throat, and Nicky just takes it.

Arguably, Joe has never been entirely sane (who gets a PhD in English literature and still calls themself sane?), but in that moment, he bids his remaining functioning synapses goodbye.

Nicky is moaning around his cock, his throat clicking. Saliva drips down the shaft. The head of his dick pulses as Nicky rubs his tongue at the base.

“Fuck,” Joe cries out deliriously.

Nicky pulls off entirely, proving again that Joe’s grip in his hair is incidental, that he _wants_ to be choking himself on Joe’s cock. “You can come down my throat,” he says, voice scraped raw.

Joe’s cock twitches.

When Nicky takes him down again, sucks him deep and holds him there, he’s helpless to do anything but come down Nicky’s throat. There’s blood rushing in his ears and his knees have turned to water and he thinks he wants to kiss this man’s feet and hands and cheeks.

When he’s finally done, when it’s over, when he has poured every drop of his pleasure into Nicky’s mouth, he can’t stand. It’s just not possible. He only barely makes it to the couch with Nicky’s help, shaking all over.

“Fuck,” he says at last, realizing muzzily that Nicky’s laid them down so Joe is sprawled out over him. “That was amazing.”

“I thought so, too,” Nicky says, his voice still blown out, his lips bruised red. “You are very lovely.”

Joe dips down to kiss his bruised lips

Kissing turns quickly into grinding his thigh into Nicky’s very hard cock, which turns into the two of them grappling on the sofa until Joe is wearing Nicky’s come all over his stomach where Nicky had burst warm against him, head thrown back, with a low moan that almost made Joe get hard all over again. They both stink of sweat and sex.

Joe lowers his forehead to rest it against Nicky’s collarbone, shaking with laughter.

“What?” Nicky asks, alarmed. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no,” Joe says hastily. “This is just…all very unexpected.”

“I don’t know,” Nicky says. “Not as unexpected as the first time.”

“No,” Joe agrees, “but nothing could be. I thought today I would find out what dark secrets make you have such odd taste in love stories. Instead I had the best orgasm of my life.”

“You win some, you lose some.” Nicky manages to keep his solemn tone for mere moments before they both burst into laughter again.

Later, while Nicky’s still in the shower, Joe orders pizza and wanders through his living room. He’s inspecting the wall of books when Nicky walks back in, successfully distracting him by being wet and half-naked.

“See something you like?” Nicky asks, eyebrow cocked.

“Your bookshelves are gorgeous,” Joe tells him.

“Oh,” Nicky says, surprised. “Thank you. I made them myself.”

Over pizza, Joe discovers that Nicky is a carpenter. He collects driftwood and recycled materials and turns them into furniture, and the shop downstairs is his.

“You _are_ a hipster,” he whispers to himself.

“I still don’t know what that means,” Nicky frowns.

“How did you get into carpentry?” Joe asks instead of explaining, because they’re getting along and he doesn’t want to chance it.

Nicky shrugs. “I went to a Catholic boarding school. One of the teachers had some interesting ideas about immersive bible study.”

Joe blinks. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“Problem children like me got to learn what it was like to live like _Our Lord and Savior_ ,” Nicky continues, the last said with air quotes. “He was apprenticed to Joseph, of course, as a carpenter, for most of his life.”

“Right,” Joe says weakly. “That’s…I’m sorry, you were a problem child?”

Nicky laughs. “I like that that’s the part that you got stuck on. I was sixteen and very angry at the world. Being forced to make a few chairs is hardly the worst thing that’s happened in a Catholic boarding school, and Padre Matteo is very proud of me. He sends Christmas cards.”

“Okay,” Joe says. “I’m just gonna process that later. Why were you so angry?”

Nicky wipes the pizza grease off his lips, succeeding only in leaving them shinier than before. “My parents divorced and my father blamed me for being gay.”

“Oh, no wonder you hate Henry James,” Joe blurts out. He immediately follows it with, “I’m sorry, that was very rude. That’s awful.”

Nicky waves a hand. “No, no, you’re right. Henry James is very bad at capturing the pain involved in family dynamics. It’s also why I like Maugham.”

“Because everyone has been a dick to you, too,” Joe surmises. “Did you know he was probably gay?”

“Maugham?”

“I looked him up,” Joe admits. “I couldn’t let it go. Certainly explains why he can’t write a straight love story for shit.”

“Maybe we should read _Maurice_ next,” Nicky suggests with a quirk of his lips. Joe had seen it, in three different editions in a place of pride on Nicky’s shelf.

“I think that’s one we both know by heart,” Joe says.

“True.” Nicky pauses briefly, then says, “So how did you end up teaching English literature?”

Joe laughs like a door creaking shut. “You know, those who can’t do, teach, and all that.”

Nicky’s forehead furrows again, like he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t ask, either.

* * *

Because Joe managed to ask for Nicky’s phone number, the last time around, they meet up at Joe’s apartment the next time.

Nicky had asked him for something beautiful to read, this time. “Not something you think is good,” he said. “Something you think is beautiful.”

Joe had texted him a picture of the page _Love in Bloom_ was on in the Arabic-English edition of Abu Nuwas he keeps on the bookshelf in his bedroom.

Nile helps Joe clean up his apartment when he realizes he should probably not have used paintbrushes and coffee cups on every available surface. All she asks in return is to tease him mercilessly.

She starts out easy – “How’s the hipster?” She asks, tossing a dried-up tube of paint into a trash bag.

“He’s not a hipster,” Joe says.

She raises an eyebrow. “Does he or does he not have a man bun?”

“I know, I know,” Joe defends. “But he doesn’t even know what hipsters are. I don’t think he’s very online.”

“Okay,” Nile says. “So he’s like an unaware hipster.”

Joe wobbles his hand in a sort-of motion. “Eh. I think if he knew what hipsters were he would cut his hair.”

“So, you’re dating Schrödinger’s hipster,” Nile summarizes.

“Yup,” Joe says, wondering if they are, in fact, dating.

“Sébastien was worried, you know,” she tells him. “He said you fought last time you met.”

“We did,” Joe admits. “We seem to do that a lot.”

Nile gives him a look.

“He has really bad opinions about literature.”

“Okay,” Nile says. “That’s a normal thing to say about the person you’re dating.”

Joe throws a paintbrush at her.

At seven, Nicky shows up, and Joe has actually managed to cook, but it goes cold because Nicky gets too distracted staring at every piece of art in Joe’s living room.

“I don’t make homemade baba ghanoush for just anyone, you know,” Joe protests weakly, trailing after Nicky as he inspects the piece Joe finished in an absolute fury after they met for the first time.

“And I appreciate your efforts,” Nicky says absently. “Joe, why on earth do you teach literature and not…this?”

“Because I have a degree in literature,” Joe says very sensibly, and doesn’t mention the half-dozen galleries in New York that turned him down before he wised up.

“But this is—these are… _wonderful_.”

“Yeah, well,” Joe says, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “So far, it’s only you and a few of my professors who think so.”

“Americans have no taste,” Nicky says impatiently. “This is known. No other nation would think Thoreau is worth more than toilet paper.”

“I know, right,” Joe agrees. “Has his mom bring him picnic lunches and then writes all about how he’s living alone in the woods.”

“Pathetic,” Nicky says.

“Hey, we found one we agree on!” Joe points out, pleased.

“Mm,” Nicky says. “I thought the poem was a little sappy.”

“Sappy!” Joe exclaims. “Sappy, are you—”

Then he catches the tick in Nicky’s cheek, the little, subtle tell, and groans. “You fucker,” he says.

“Not yet,” Nicky says pleasantly.

Nicky, it turns out, is very flexible, and his thighs are a solid weight over Joe’s own as he plows into Nicky, knees barely holding steady on the mattress.

It’s good enough that, in the midst of it, Joe says, “Please tell me you’re not doing this with anyone else.”

Deliberately, Nicky clenches down around him. “Who else would be wrong about Charlotte Brontë _and_ fuck me through the mattress?”

“Fuck you,” Joe says. “ _Shirley_ is clearly her best book.”

“If you say so,” Nicky says doubtfully, and Joe fucks him twice as hard so he stops talking.

It’s worth it when Nicky’s eyes roll back, hands clutching at the headboard, and he gasps, “No one else could fuck me this good, I swear, _Joe_!”

They eat bread dipped in baba ghanoush in bed, an hour after Joe had planned on it, while the lamb reheats in the oven.

“You should really try selling your paintings,” Nicky says through a mouthful of bread.

“I did,” Joe says. “No one wants them.”

“I bet you’re wrong.”

When Joe had told Booker as much, Booker had mumbled in commiseration. Joe is almost certain he had his own failed novel somewhere.

But this – this—

“What do you mean, you bet I’m wrong?”

Nicky shrugs, his naked shoulders broad and tempting. “I bet you’re wrong. Give me a painting and I bet you I can sell it in a week.”

“For more than ten dollars,” Joe says.

“For more than a hundred,” Nicky says.

This is how, accidentally, Joe goes into business with Nicky.

Infuriatingly, Nicky is right, and he sells the second one for five hundred. By the third one, Joe talks Nicky into at least taking a sales commission.

By the fifth, Joe talks himself into resubmitting his poetry to editors, under a less foreign-sounding name.

When he gets accepted, Nicky pops a bottle of champagne and toasts to Americans having no taste.

When Joe’s contract at Lewis and Clark runs out, he doesn’t bother looking for a new one.

Just to keep the status quo in check, he does claim _Paradiso_ is Dante’s best work so that Nicky will disagree with him violently enough to fuck him over the solid oak table in their shared dining room.

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly: Why does Joe teach European literature and not North African/Arabic literature? His parents are diplomats, so he grew up in the States, and when he went off to college, he didn't want to be That Guy who was studying the place he was from just to read the books he loves, so he got a lit degree instead of an Arabic degree. It turned out to be a good call, because it let him keep stuff like that Abu Nuwas poem separate from his work life. Because he's more broadly read than a lot of his specifically American/English lit colleagues, he's teaching Intro classes and Comp Lit courses, and he has fought many a war against administration that Comp Lit apparently just means European literature as opposed to the rest of the world, and if you want to read books from anywhere outside of Europe or America, you have to learn a whole other language and major in Arabic/Chinese/Russian.
> 
> Secondly: Here the literature mentioned and who is right in each argument.
> 
> White Nights - Fyodor Dostoevsky (Joe is right)  
> The Ambassadors - Henry James (They're kinda both right but Nicky is more right)  
> On Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham (Joe is right)  
> North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (They're both right)  
> My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante (Nicky is arguing that this book is emotionally resonant to him, which it was to me too, but Joe is right that the relationships are the most unhealthy)  
> Love in Bloom - Abu Nuwas (Nicky is kidding, obviously, or he would be wrong)  
> Walden - Henry David Thoreau (They're both right)  
> Shirley- Charlotte Bronte (I was going to have Joe defend Anne but I just couldn't make him like the Tenant of Wildfell Hall that much sorry. Anyway Joe is right about this although Villette is also better than Jane Eyre)  
> Maurice - E. M. Forster (They don't actually talk about it, but they do actually both think the socioeconomic connotations of the relationship are difficult)  
> Paradiso - Dante Alighieri (Joe is kidding, but Paradiso is widely seen as unreadably dull in comparison to Inferno and even Purgatorio)
> 
> (I'm kidding about all of these, clearly no one is right or wrong because it's all subjective) (unless you think Maugham has a point about altruism being selfish) (similarly, I'm mostly kidding about all the America-bashing in this fic)
> 
> Am I the first person to name an Old Guard fic after a song from evermore? Not sure. I will take the title if it comes my way, though. The title's from _willow_.
> 
> The bookstore is based on Powell's in Portland, and everything about this it [kiaya's](http://kiaya.tumblr.com) fault.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com)


End file.
